Yeah - two weeks since my last post. The little journal of goals I keep in textmate has two carry-over goals:
@personal
- Work out every night
- 1 blog post/day (real content)
- Count to 10 before replying to anyone, yourself included. (I kid!)

I have been the conductor on the failure train for both of these. The primary being the bees I referenced in the title, and by bees I mean "the last two weeks of a release". At work we've been grinding on a major upgrade to our existing product and the last few weeks have been that painful continuous repetition that comes with all major releases - test, find bug, fix bug, test, verify bug, check bug queue, repeat.

With all software releases, it's that last painful tradeoff of bug vs. release that tends to sting the most - do you delay the release and fix it now or do you bump it to a patch release late - and fixing it now means recursing back into test-ville.

I've had a weird analogy locked in my head lately - thinking of bugs as bees that want to sting you. One hurts for a minute, and then goes away - a lot at once just make you pass out. What really kills you is a batch of say, four big ones that tag you with some regularity. You just start to get angry and sullen and you want to punch the bees. In this case though, their bugs and you can't punch bugs.

Besides the stress of the release (ah, but that stress is gone right? RIGHT?) the pregnancy of the Noller continues. These past few weeks have waxed between banal and "exciting" - and of course by exciting I mean "I have started researching blood pressure medication or bleeding as a technique for relief".

Mainly, my wonderful wife is a little under one month away from the "projected" due date. In reality, we've crossed over to "oh crap are you going into labor" territory. It's all very exciting - I think we're both ready to stop being "pregnant" and to start being "sleepless" instead. It would take a lot of worry out of our lives.

Well, with any luck - I should be a bit better this week - right now I've got around 150 tagged items in NetNewsWire to followup on, and a bunch of notes to trudge through.